Ideas and suggestions for those interested in self-directed education, including home schooling and life-long learning. Also, confessions of a radically unorthodox amateur logician.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

More small gains

There hasn't been much progress on my various topics in information representation, but I think I'm going to switch the order and consider characters ahead of numbers. One reason is that characters are more general, but the other is that usually, each of them takes up smaller space. I'm running across character strings more and more often in my reviews of Assembly language and C++. I haven't made a whole lot of progress in the hardware, but I'm starting to inch into it, especially in considering video in more detail. I'm also starting to get a little more detail on the BIOS services. I'm getting a reasonable, workable picture of assembly. I have enough of the syntax organized to be useful, and I'm familiar with the basic data types. There are still some assembler directives to work on, but I'm making progress on program structure, and on the maechanics. There's been less progress on BASIC or C, but still a little.

I got an Assembler version of the program I did working (though I had to look at the results in the debugger, since I still don't have output routines). I also got a BASIC Version and a C version working and running. One of the differences between Assembly language and C is that the roles of the various operators and expressions is different. In Assembly, all the operators are applied and expressions evaluated at assembly time. In C, most of the operators are applied and expressions evaluated at run-time.